Outside the Field Museum in Chicago, a bronze sculpture by artist Marla Friedman captures a moment a friendship was made.

It’s called “The Red Palm Nut.” A young woman sits barefoot on the ground, reaching out her hand to a chimpanzee, who sits about a yard away. And he lightly, seemingly shyly, takes her human fingers into his own. A bright, red palm nut has dropped on the soil between them.

The woman in the sculpture is the great primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall, at the moment she first earned the trust of a wild chimp. “He reached out and he took and dropped that palm nut,” she later remembered. “But then very gently squeezed my fingers and that’s how chimpanzees reassure each other. So in that moment we understood each other without the use of human words, the language

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